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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 10 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

December 17, 2010

A father for Christmas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Shame about the bike,” I said to the strained young black man at the bus stop. His head was down and he was staring hard at the ground.

He grunted, a sound that conveyed two ideas: “I heard you” and “I’m not listening.”

“Just as well, I guess. A bike like that…”

He looked up for a moment, piercing me with hard black eyes. “What about it?”

“Oh, you know. Wouldn’t last too long, now would it?”

He scoffed, and that was that. Or so he thought…

What happened was this: I saw a bike going in to Toys ‘R’ Us, about a week before Christmas, and that’s the kind of thing I just have to follow up on.

It was a girl’s bike — a girly bike. Sixteen inch white wheels. A white frame speckled with iridescent pink and purple flakes. An iridescent pink and purple flaked saddle. And matching pink and purple flaked streamers cascading out of the white handle-bar grips. It was the kind of bike Toys ‘R’ Us loves to sell: Thirty-five dollars worth of bike with three dollars worth of plastic ornaments is priced at sixty bucks. Ten dollars extra for professional assembly.

The bike had been dragged into the store by my companion at the bus stop — tall, thin, with an expression of anger etched into his face. Maybe twenty years old; certainly not twenty-five. He was wearing a Michael Jordan warm-up suit and Michael Jordan basketball shoes. That sounds very casual, but we’re talking three hundred dollars, maybe more. At first I thought he might be bringing the bike in for a minor repair, but something about the way he was dragging it — sideways by the saddle — made me think again.

I didn’t go into the store, but I stuck around to see what would happen. Sure enough, he came out bikeless and stalked over to wait for the bus. Three hundred dollars worth of Michael Jordan haberdashery but no car.

I said, “A little girl has a bike like that, she’s just bait on the hook. Doesn’t have a father around to stand up for her, Read more

December 14, 2010

The global history of health and wealth over the past 200 years — expressed visually in four minutes.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is amazing, but what’s more astounding to me is to think of how much more dramatic this presentation could have been without the taxes, restraints and wars foisted upon us by the state. Health and wealth are found first and most in free countries, last and worst in slave states. The inference to be drawn is obvious: The less government there is, the greater the longevity and prosperity of ordinary people.

December 13, 2010

Christmas at the cemetery — with Bubba

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

December 25, 1998 – Christmas Day

If you want to hear your thoughts echo into a perfect silence – go to the cemetery.

I do it a lot, actually, not to be too terribly morbid. Potter’s fields and VA graveyards and tidy middle-class golf courses of the dead and tony, upscale permanent condominiums where they frown loudly on walk-in traffic. But democracy makes her last stand at the cemetery, so no one is ever actually turned away, and I expect it would take quite a performance to get yourself ejected.

But the cemetery is not the story – it’s just the honest part. The other part – to be much too kind – starts with my growing a tail.

A Secret Service tail, that is. Last August I wrote a story called ‘How Bubba pulled it off.’ It’s about a teenage masturbator who just happens to be President of the United States, and just after I wrote it I started noticing the tail.

Like this is so hard. I walk from place to place, that’s what I do. Sometimes I take a bus or a train or the subway. Rarely do I fly. Mostly I walk. When you’re walking into an empty dawn on an empty two lane road in upstate New York and the only car on the road is a big black Crown Victoria with D.C. tags, when it’s following you at idling speed with the running lights on – it’s a safe bet you’ve been fed-infested.

Four teams of two agents each, it turned out. They worked in eight hour shifts, and there is no better way to draw attention to yourself than to walk through a small town during the shift change with not one but two big black Crown Victorias following you.

At first it kinda ticked me off. I would run little games on the bozos to lose them – skipping the wrong way down a one-way street, in one door and right out the other, exiting through the freight entrance, that kind of stuff. They would not get out of the car, so I spent about a Read more

December 2, 2010

Unchained melodies: An ostensive exposition of the vital importance of shit-kicker music to the maintenance of a rebel attitude.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve been listening to Badlands Country, a rockin’ kind of outlaw alt.country internet radio station. You can get it through the link above, but it should be available from just about any internet radio client. I found it first on iTunes, if that helps, and I listen to in on my iPhone by way of ooTunes, which is totally worth having just by itself.

Badlands has a pretty long playlist, most of it in-your-face rebel country — with zero Nashville pop pabulum.

The station is epoch-eclectic, to say the least, but one of the things I like about it is that they play a lot of classic country, the stuff you will never hear on broadcast stations.

Like this: When Johnny Cash was most enthralled by the music of Bob Dylan, he wrote an homage to Don’t think twice, it’s alright called Understand your man. The debt to Dylan is more than obvious, but the Man in Black wrote a song that is darker, funnier and much more true to the reality of a broken marriage:

I love songwriters as much as I love their songs, and Lacy J. Dalton recorded the absolute best song about songwriting in Sixteenth Avenue:

My pappy purely loves Tom T. Hall, one of the great Nashville songwriters, and I love it that there is still room for his music in the Badlands:

Is all that too old-timey for you? That whole Texas alt.country scene is well-represented, from Chris Knight to Reckless Kelly to James McMurtry. Here’s Fred Eaglesmith with I like trains:

And if you’re lookin’ for more of a back-beat, more of an urban rhythm, the Badlands has you covered, with tunes like this cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and juice from The Gourds (not safe for work, kids or your mom):

There’s always room for bebop in our lives — and especially in my car. But Badlands Country is a rockin’ way to deliver the goods in the office.

November 29, 2010

I ran today for the first time in sixteen years…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you’ve seen me in real life, you that know I walk with an ugly limp. I walk fast, but I don’t walk pretty. I was in a car accident in October of 1994, and one of my injuries was the severing of the nerves that control my left foot. Looks normal, works okay, but I can’t push off with that foot, nor curl my toes toward my nose, nor elevate that foot when it’s hanging in mid-air.

I have nothing to complain about. I had truly great doctors, including eight hours under the lights with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Stuart Kozinn, a consistent favorite in Phoenix magazine’s “Best Doctors” feature.

And, since then, my legs have always been very strong. Dr. Kozinn and I were both determined that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, so I did everything I could to get my legs back under me. I can ride my bike for miles and miles at top speed in the desert heat, because that’s how I got my stride back.

But: I could not run. You have to be able to push off to run, because your toes can’t be dragging on the ground as you are swinging your leg forward. That would hurt — even before you tripped and fell on your face.

I loved to run before the accident. I never cared about exercise when I was young, but I never needed to: I was a high-D in a red-hot hurry. I ran everywhere. I loped everywhere, sailing through the air in nine-yard strides.

So when I couldn’t run any longer, I really missed it. I dream about running, and I love to go to the supermarket so I can run through the aisles, supporting my upper body on the shopping cart.

And all that changed today. Cathleen has been on my case for a while to buy Skechers Shape-Ups shoes. The marketing promise is better fitness, a workout while you walk, but the reality is pretty dramatic. There is so much up-thrust from the heels of those shoes that they replicate the effect of a strong Read more

November 25, 2010

“Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged. I love that quotation and I love this holiday, second only to Independence Day. I’m working today, because that’s what I do, but I’m celebrating, too, because I have worked so hard and so well.

Here’s to the dogs — to the people who write, comment and read here. Living anywhere near my world can be a disquieting thing, I know, but I hope you never doubt my gratitude.

And here’s to another year of hard work — and to the Splendor that comes from working wisely and well.

November 16, 2010

Looking for a Realtor designation that really means something? How about this? “Too Outspoken For Redfin.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Redfin.com is in the long, slow process of firing us from their referral partnership program. I’ve known this was going to happen since last Tuesday. It’s what I was writing about in my most influential voice in the on-line world of real estate post:

  • They piss and moan to each other about me behind my back.
  • They campaign with each other to try to damage my interests.
  • They pester contributors here to try get them to abandon BloodhoundBlog.

The actual coup de grâce hasn’t happened yet, but Glenn Kelman placed a sweet call to me last night to apologize to me, as a friend, for not countermanding the bold policy initiatives of his middle managers.

This is nothing to me, for a lot of reasons. I grew up hiding from my poor long-suffering mother, so she wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell me what to do and not do. I spent the first half of my working life hiding from my employers, doing truly remarkable work, like a cobbler’s elf, after the bosses went home. This is why I don’t have a job now, and haven’t had one for decades. I know from experience that if I have anything that looks at all like a job, sooner or later, my fated role will be to serve as the rag doll in someone else’s self-destructive fit. I actually felt that gloomy foreboding twice, on the way into Redfin’s referral plan, so it’s not as if I can claim to have been taken by surprise.

It’s a stupid thing to do, of course, but, while I’ve been fired several times in my life, I’ve never been fired for a good reason. Cathleen and I responded rapidly to every inquiry Redfin sent us, even though many of the referrals they passed along were from loosely motivated, suspicious folks with serious qualification issues. I tried to explain to them that, even though I sell a lot of cheap houses, I’m selling most of them to millionaires, while Cathleen almost always works with very well-heeled homeowners. That entreaty hit a corporate policy wall, with the result that any financially well-qualified buyers Redfin Read more

November 14, 2010

The politics of dancing: Mothertongue and the art of negotiation.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I could argue that much of what goes on in the social sciences consists of pseudo-scientific “proofs” that the human mind is nothing special. Sure, volitional-conceptuality — the ability to engage in mental self-reference by means of abstraction and the ability to act upon those abstractions as a free moral agent — is unprecedented in the animal kingdom, but this dolphin has learned four of the first five letters of the Roman alphabet, and that chimp can stack three boxes on top of one another to steal a cookie. If that ain’t human, they don’t know what is!

Here’s what’s funny: They don’t know what animals are, either!

Monkeys don’t need to do a charmingly poor job at deploying human tools to survive, and cetaceans are perfectly adept at communicating with each other without a notation system — without what I would call fathertongue.

When I’m showing real estate, I’m careful to teach people, especially children, what a dog is doing with his tail. Up and wagging? Take it slow, but the dog is friendly. Straight down? Proceed with caution. Between the legs? Back off. The tail is a dog’s primary signaling device. That’s why people who want dogs to fight bob their tails.

But that wagging tail tells such a tale: “Hi, there!” the dog seems to say. “I am thrilled to make your acquaintance. As you can see by my wagging tail, I’m eager to make new friends. Might I have permission to sniff your anus? Full reciprocity, of course. Really, I’d be put out if you didn’t give mine at least a little sniff, too.”

That’s mothertongue, a complex initiation of negotiations expressed entirely in bodily signaling, with zero conceptual content — with no fathertongue. Animals are perfect the way they are. They are not somehow “better” if they master what are, to them, ontologically-useless parlor tricks. Moreover, human beings are exalted, not diminished, by dancing bears: The vast chasm between emulating human behavior and actually living it is only made more obvious when we see how pitiable that emulation actually is.

The higher animals communicate by mothertongue, and all but one species is Read more

November 14, 2010

The Implied Accusation in real estate: How to win the war on your attitude…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. I wrote this years ago (urf!), but it’s one of the most important posts I’ve written here. –GSS

 
I had this as a comment late last night:

Your cockiness and arrogance is only matched by your incompetence

The author is Keith Brand from Housing Panic, writing under one of the half-dozen or so sock-puppet email addresses he uses. Don’t go looking for the comment. I have him blocked completely.

The comment was in response to my post last night, Stopping traffic to sell houses.

The remarks themselves are stupefyingly stupid, of course. Obviously I am arrogant and cocky — I think for good reason, but good reason or bad, I will be the first to lay the charges. “Insufferable bastard” fits me to a tee. “Incompetence” is simply comical in this context. I invented the idea of the custom real estate sign, was grasping for it through two generations of our signs before it was physically possible.

Oh, well. Who besides Keith Brand does not know that Keith Brand is an idiot? It’s very funny that he has chosen me as his poster child for a dumb Realtor, given who I am, given what we’ve done here. You could argue that this is the perfect testament to his stupidity, but there is more to be unearthed in the graveyard that is Keith Brand’s rotting soul.

Consider: Do I know I’m cocky? Do I know I’m arrogant? Do I know I am supremely competent — as a Realtor, as a real estate weblogger, as a real estate marketing innovator? I not only know that all of these things are true, they are among the very many proud facts of my life. So what could Keith Brand hope to achieve by saying,

Your cockiness and arrogance is only matched by your incompetence

Is this supposed to move me to despair? Me?

But: A different remark in a different context with a different person might have that effect. I am impervious to criticism. It’s either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, I am enriched for having learned better. If not, so what? But other people are different, Read more

November 10, 2010

I’m a time-waster. How about you?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the point: My name is Greg Swann, and I am a time-waster. My next closing is Wednesday, November 17th, 2010.

It’s news that is my special poison, a quick check of major news and opinion sites several times a day. Stir that in with email, some of it work, some of it work-ish, some of it just more time-wasting. And blend all of that with lots of tiny little brief chores done for clients at various stages of “the process.”

That’s a half-productive day. I start at six, finish at six or nine or one — the next day. And if I spin in place like that all day, I can get half as much done as I should have.

It’s not that I’m working from home. I’ve worked from home for almost twenty years, and I’ve always been able to get a lot done when I need to.

And it’s not the internet as such — duh! I’ve worked on the internet for most of my life.

And I’m not even really a bad, bad boy. It’s just checking this for a minute and that other thing for a couple more, all while taking care of business, yes-sir-ee-boss. By the end of the hour, I’ve rarely wasted more than 20 minutes, so what’s the beef?

The beef would be the stuff that’s missing between these two slices of bread, as it turns out.

I don’t care for the example being set by prominent members of the RE.net on social media sites, but I also don’t care if their seemingly-constant TwitBooking helps or hurts them.

This is what I care about: Hundreds and thousands of ordinary working stiffs are mimicking those poor examples, in the mistaken belief that scrupulously documenting every burp and bowel movement will make them successful.

But, from my own corpus: “Egovangelist, motivate thyself!” It’s all one thing, and the way to help other people get good at getting things right is to get good at getting things right. I love to think of myself as a hugely productive being, and the job that matters most to me is not scolding other people for being Read more

November 9, 2010

Attention Brad Inman: I don’t want your dipshit “most influential” citation again this year, either, but it is beyond obvious that I am by far the most influential voice in the on-line world of real estate.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s start with some music, just to set the mood:

So: If you run in the wrong circles, these are the kind of “arguments” you can expect to hear about me:

  • Greg Swann is mean.
  • Greg Swann is rude.
  • Greg Swann is vulgar.
  • Greg Swann is angry.
  • Greg Swann is cynical.

Here is an argument you won’t hear anywhere, except possibly at BloodhoundBlog:

  • Greg Swann is wrong, and here’s why…

You won’t hear the latter argument for two reasons: I don’t take positions I can’t defend with an impervious impenetrable invulnerability. And: If I should happen to discover that I have been wrong, generally I will be the first person to figure that out and I will announce my error to the world immediately.

What explains all the ad hominem arguments cited among the first set? You figure it out.

These are the kinds of games that some folks are running while making these persuasively useless claims about my character:

  • They piss and moan to each other about me behind my back.
  • They campaign with each other to try to damage my interests.
  • They pester contributors here to try get them to abandon BloodhoundBlog.

In each of these cases, I think they’re doing me favors — which assertion will probably just piss them off more. People who run in mobs don’t like me, and I don’t like them. Anything dominating personalities can do to recruit those folks to their own side of the table can only save me time in the long run.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this song summarizes my position on this kind of behavior — along with every other kind of behavior:

Recent events have made it more than obvious that I am by far the most influential person in the wired world of real estate. People are wasting irreplaceable hours and days of their lives obsessing over me, topping each other with tales of how ardently they don’t pay any attention to me.

Why would this be so? Again, you have to figure this out on your own, but my take is that they know I’m right and yet they don’t want to be right.

Witness:

November 8, 2010

Tête-à-tête in Tombstone

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

When the shadow blocked the doorway of Johnny Ringo’s, everyone in the bar looked up. The door was propped open and traffic was brisk. The glare of the late afternoon sun fought the gloom of the little taproom to a draw. But then gloom captured the turf enduringly, and we all looked up to see why.

The stranger leaning against the doorjamb was long and lean and very relaxed. He wore black wool trousers pegged at the ankles over ornately-tooled snakeskin boots. His dove-grey top coat fit him like a glove. Beneath it he wore a rich brocade waistcoat and a white linen shirt open at the collar. He had eyes the color of coal and flowing brown hair that spilled halfway down his back. His handlebar moustache was trimmed and combed and waxed to perfection. A red silk cravat finished the ensemble, that and two nickel-plated Colt 45s with carved ivory grips. The sidearms were mounted high, at his ribs, and a double-barreled shotgun, breech open, was slung across his left arm.

And even though Johnny Ringo’s is the tourist trap for the sophisticated tourist, still everyone gawked. Everyone except one man in the corner at the end of the bar, a man nearly perfectly concealed by the gloom. He looked up at the stranger in the doorway and there was genuine fear in his eyes.

The stranger was looking right at him. Looking right through him. He didn’t stare, he glared, and the room fell deathly silent — not a nervous cough, not a stolen breath. The fearful man tried to the hold the stranger’s gaze but couldn’t. He looked down at the drink before him on the table then looked up again quickly, something furtive in his eyes. The stranger nodded slowly and said, “I’m your huckleberry.”

Some moron guffawed in recognition but this didn’t relieve the tension, it added to it.

The stranger stood up straight and snapped the breech of the shotgun closed. He hefted it high in the air and the bartender snagged it with two hands. He mounted it on two pegs over the back-bar. Read more

November 7, 2010

What is Splendor? For me it’s exuberance and indomitability.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Start here: I’m not trying to piss you off. If you don’t want to read what I have to say, don’t. There are thousands of essays on this site, many recent and eye-opening, others older but canonical. You can find what you want here — or you can seek elsewhere. You have no reason to endure something you don’t want to read. You don’t have to, and I don’t want you to.

Now then:

This is funny: I live in a state of fairly continuous delight. It’s not always the case, but I would paint my state of mind most of the time — and especially when I’m working at something I love — as exuberance. It can be hugely external, and I know I sometimes wear my wife out when I’m playing with ideas out loud. But it can also be almost searingly apollonian — as here, as it happens — and I can sustain a kind of frenzied concentration for hours on end.

Why is it funny — to me, at least? Because it’s just excellent comedy, the radical juxtaposition of two opposites — the expectation that I simply must be angry or dour or cynical and the actual experience of being, for me and for people who spend time with me. I am having fun — deeply satisfying fun — almost all of the time. So much so that I don’t even think about it, except when I consciously direct myself to think about it. And that, thinking about the way my mind functions, is a delight for me just by itself.

Delight, exuberance, searing concentration — these are mothertongue ideas, and this is the job that art does for us: Poets and painters and playwrights and novelists use abstractions in ways that induce us to see not mere words or images but the essence of being itself. We know we are complicit in an illusion — not real life, just a simulation — but we surrender ourselves to it and live it from the inside, at least in imagination.

I have written hundreds of thousands of words in my life, but I Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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